The overall aim was to study transgender persons’ experiences of, and reactions upon, attitudes and social norms in relation to their gender identity. Another question that was relevant to answer was how transgender persons are affected by the hetero norm. The method used to collect data was through questionnaires published on the internet. The only requirement to participate was to be a transgender over 18 years old, and when the survey closed, 35 respondents had answered it. The questionnaire consisted of both quantitative and qualitative questions. Collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and content analysis.

The results indicate that transgender persons living conditions are largely affected by norms, and that they encounter a considerable amount of negative attitudes due to their gender identity. To "pass" as either man or woman turned out to be something that made it easier for transgender people to evade negative attitudes.

One hope is that this study can provide knowledge to different instances in the community to open up to be more open to critical thinking around norms.

The conclusion was that persons with a transgender identity are affected by societal norms and by heteronormativity. It takes a lot of courage to be able to be one self but everything boils down to how strong a person are and the availability of support and role models in the surrounding society.

Drawing on an extensive amount of work by other researchers, as well as some literary sources from the time, Goran Adamson discusses the widespread view that Nazism was anti-sex. Indeed, during Nazi rule homosexuality and street prostitution were persecuted, and Jews and “degenerates” were prevented from having sex (not merely by law, but by elimination). However, reported circumstances such as cheap access to condoms, a high number of pregnancies during party rallies, and quasi-religious cultivation of “the Germanic sexual instinct” would suggest that matters may have been much less restrictive for the majority of Germans. The idea of an overall Nazi anti-sex attitude may well have been constructed by intellectuals from the Freudian Left/Frankfurt School, especially their theories of an intimate connection between sexual repression and authoritarianism. Such views gained widespread popularity with the 68’ generation, and they were an essential reason why sexuality came to be considered the cure for all social evils. This overestimation of the significance of sexual liberation, and recent conservative reactions to it, constitute an important part of today’s political landscape.

The report gives an introduction to the Linköping-Örebro Centre of Gender Excellence: GEXcel - Gendering EXcellence: Towards a European Centre of Excellence in Transnational and Transdisciplinary Studies of Changing Gender Relations, Intersectionalities and Embodiment.

In a recent issue of this journal, Vandermassen suggested that feminists should include sexual selection theory and evolutionary psychology in a unifying theory of human nature. In response, this article aims to offer some insight into the development of sexual selection theory, to caution against Vandermassen’s unreserved assimilation and to promote the opposite ongoing integration – an inclusion of gender perspectives into evolutionary biology. In society today, opinions about maintaining traditional sex roles are often put forward on the basis of what is natural and how animals behave. However, the natural sciences have proved to be pervaded by gendered values and interests; Darwin’s theory of sexual selection has been criticized for being male biased, and partly due to the unwillingness of Darwin’s scientific contemporaries to accept female choice, research has been overwhelmingly focused on males. More recently, theory has become less gender biased and research has come to include a large variety of issues not present in the first version of the theory. However, there is a need to increase the awareness of gender bias in order to develop a gender-neutral evolutionary biology.

Biological sex differences have long been used as argumentsjustifying male dominance and sexist oppression. Animal studies ofsex differences are used to claim that human sex roles have a longevolutionary history. For example, in a study of toy preferences invervet monkeys, the authors conclude that sex-differentiatedobject preferences arose early in human evolution. In this paper Iscrutinize the study and reveal that both the hypotheses, theperformed preference tests and the conclusions drawn are flawed.In the study, the authors hypothesise that male vervets shouldprefer a ball and a car based on the human hunter-gathererhypothesis. Men are suggested to be selected for navigatingabilities useful for hunting and women for nurturing babies. Thishypothesis is then transferred to vervets which is a tree-livingspecies, subsisting of a mainly vegetarian diet, where skills such asnavigating in space ought to be necessary for survival - in bothmales and females. Furthermore, the presentation of toys isconducted in groups, individual interactions with a toy is taken as apreference for the sex of that individual. Therefore it is impossibleto derive individual preferences from these tests. Vervets arematrilinear with females sometimes being dominant to males. Froman animal behaviour framework, I would interpret the preferencesas an interaction between individuals. Perhaps low-rankedindividuals approach new objects first, as they may be dangerous.The results are interpreted and presented with graphs and picturesin order to tell the convincing story about sex differences in toypreference that the authors wanted to find, but there is no support tfor these conclusions.Hence, from the evidence presented in this study, we cannotconclude that human sex-differentiated toy preferences date morethan 23 million years back in time.

The diversity, variability, and apparent rapid evolution of animal genitalia are a vivid focus of research in evolutionary biology, and studies exploring genitalia have dramatically increased over the past decade. These studies, however, exhibit a strong male bias, which has worsened since 2000, despite the fact that this bias has been explicitly pointed out in the past. Early critics argued that previous investigators too often considered only males and their genitalia, while overlooking female genitalia or physiology. Our analysis of the literature shows that overall this male bias has worsened with time. The degree of bias is not consistent between subdisciplines: studies of the lock-and-key hypothesis have been the most male focused, while studies of cryptic female choice usually consider both sexes. The degree of bias also differed across taxonomic groups, but did not associate with the ease of study of male and female genital characteristics. We argue that the persisting male bias in this field cannot solely be explained by anatomical sex differences influencing accessibility. Rather the bias reflects enduring assumptions about the dominant role of males in sex, and invariant female genitalia. New research highlights how rapidly female genital traits can evolve, and how complex coevolutionary dynamics between males and females can shape genital structures. We argue that understanding genital evolution is hampered by an outdated single-sex bias.

Feminism in Sweden as well as in the other Scandinavian countries was largely formulated as state feminism. The women's movement has cooperated with feminists in the state, resulting in societies that count as the most gender equal in the world. The Scandinavian countries are consistently ranked in the top position on international gender equality indices. The state has provided a large publicly financed welfare sector that both employs many women, and makes it possible to combine work and family through family friendly policies. The last decade has seen a politica l change influenced by neoliberal thought, in which politicians hand over welfare state responsibilities to the market, and instead encourage entrepreneurship, not least among women. The Swedish government has since 20 years back programs and policies to promote women's entrepreneurship. The Swedish state has during the same period shrunk the pub lic sector and privatized many operations in services and care, which traditionally employ many women. Instead, women are encouraged to start businesses in former public sectors. Empirica l studies suggest however, that all of the increase of women 's entrepreneurs hip in these sectors is within low-paid, micro service businesses, typically child minding.

Traditional state feminism has also changed character. Instead of public regulations, market solutions are advocated. In this paper we ask how to theorize this change from a feminist theory perspective; we ask what the implications for feminist action are, and we ask what consequences for women's position in society are. We use research literature and policy texts as our empirical material and conduct a critical literature analysis. We conclude that the entrepreneurship discourse challenges, and possibly weakens state feminism and feminist action as we have known it in the Scandinavian countries, but may also offer new forms of feminist resistance, on market terms.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a re‐directed and purposeful attention to the design of research on gender and entrepreneurship moving forward.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper questions the value of more studies on the men v. women binary and encourages research on the institutions supporting the gendered construction.

Findings – The paper suggests a re‐framing of gender (to include men, women, femininity, masculinity, etc.) both in topics investigated and in building the cadre of scholars engaged. It asks for discrimination of gender from biological sex in language use and believes that dialogue will be improved if the word “gender” is maintained as a socially constructed phenomenon directed at distinguishing the norms around “what women do” and “what men do”. Researchers, too, must necessarily confront personal pre‐existing ideas and language shaped by the norms and habits of one's upbringing and daily life in societies that are not acute observers of gender in action.

Originality/value – The paper assesses trends in research on gender and entrepreneurship and recommends ideas regarding new directions to create better research and application in practice, teaching, and training.

The last two decades have seen major welfare state retrenchment in Sweden. The public sector, which used to be a large and stable employer for women, was downsized. Public schools and public health and care services were privatized. Customer choice models were introduced. The rhetoric connected to privatization stressed the unique opportunities for women formerly employed by the state to start their own businesses in this sector, now open for competition and private initiatives. In this paper we ask what the results were. We discuss the results from a feminist perspective, i.e we ask if privatization and business ownership has improved women’s situation on the labor market, or not. The paper draws together the research findings from our own empirical research (about fifteen different studies) as well as from research done by other Nordic scholars in the field.

The last two decades have seen major welfare state retrenchment in Sweden. The public sector, which used to be a large and stable employer for women, was downsized. Public schools and public health and care services were privatized. Customer choice models were introduced. The rhetoric connected to privatization stressed the unique opportunities for women formerly employed by the state to start their own businesses in this sector, now open for competition and private initiatives. In this paper we ask what the results were. We discuss the results from a feminist perspective, i.e we ask if privatization and business ownership has improved women’s situation on the labor market, or not. The paper draws together the research findings from our own empirical research (about fifteen different studies) as well as from research done by other Nordic scholars in the field.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to assess and describe the meanings given to "gender" in scientific publications that evaluate multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary or multimodal rehabilitation for patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain.

Method: A systematic literature search for papers evaluating multimodal rehabilitation was conducted. The PubMed and EBSCO databases were searched from 1995 to 2015. Two or three researchers independently read each paper, performed a quality assessment and coded meanings of gender using qualitative content analysis.

Results: Twenty-seven papers were included in the review. Gender was used very differently in the MMR studies investigated but primarily it referred to factual differences between men and women. Only one paper provided a definition of the concept of gender and how it had been used in that study. In the content analysis, the meaning of gender formed three categories: "Gender as a factual difference", "The man is the ideal" and "Gender as a result of social role expectations".

Conclusions: The meaning of the concept of gender in multimodal rehabilitation is undefined and needs to be developed further. The way the concept is used should be defined in the design and evaluation of multimodal rehabilitation in future studies.

Implications for rehabilitation

Healthcare professionals should reflect on gender relations in encounters with patients, selection of patients into rehabilitation programs and design of programs. In rehabilitation for chronic pain the patients' social circumstances and cultural context should be given the same consideration as biological sex and pain symptoms.

This thesis investigates women's feelings on being subjected to piropos (catcalling) in their everyday lives. Through interviews with four Cuban women living in Havana, I analyse women's experiences of piropos through a phenomenological lens and through speech theory, investigating how norms surrounding sexualities and gender are materialised in and between language, bodies and spaces. I also investigate which acts of resistance and defence mechanisms my interviewees employ in order to cope with piropos. The first part of the analysis investigates the gendered dimensions of piropos, discussing how it constitutes gendered subject positions while enforcing gender inequality. My interviewees describe how being subjected to piropos makes them feel more feminine and links the occurrence of piropos directly to their self-esteem. They also describe how the occurrence of piropos conditions their possibility to move freely around the city. In the second part of the analysis I look at piropos as a heterosexual game in which different rules apply depending on gender. Lastly, this thesis focuses on my interviewees' accounts of resistance by analysing silence as well as verbal responses to piropos as a way of breaking the rules of the heterosexual game.

Challenging the clergy’s monoclinic interpretational power, Islamic feminists in Iran, by emphasizing the historical context of the holy texts and reformulating Islamic concepts and law from a “feminist” perspective, are developing a new direction in rethinking gender in Islam. By opening the doors of interpretation of sacred texts and debates on women issues to other groups than Muslims, they have braked with reactive gender conservatism and West phobia prevailing among fundamentalists, and have embarked on connecting themselves with Western feminism and weaving new textual connections between Muslim women and Western feminism.

This paper presents an experimental study of perceptions about gay, lesbian, and heterosexual domestic violence in Sweden. More than 1,000 participants were asked to read one out of eight possible fictitious scenarios of domestic violence in married couple relationships and subsequently respond to a questionnaire. Sexual orientation, victims’ and batterers’ gender, and severity of the violence varied across the different scenarios. The clearest result of this study was that participants perceived domestic violence to be significantly more serious when a man battered his wife than in any other case (i.e., when a woman battered her husband, when a gay man battered his husband, or when a lesbian woman battered her wife). In all types of relationships, participants matched their perceptions of domestic violence to the level of severity of the violence and participants with more negative attitudes toward women perceived domestic violence as less serious. Female participants were more concerned about lesbian domestic violence than male participants. Attitudes toward gays and lesbians mattered little for the perceptions of domestic violence.

In this paper we explore annual earnings as well as full-time monthlyearnings differentials resulting from sexual orientation. We observe that gay malesare at an earnings disadvantage compared to male heterosexuals regardless of whichearnings measure we use. This earnings disadvantage is found to be larger when wecompare gay and heterosexual males who are working full-time. In addition, thedisadvantage is larger in the private than in the public sector. Lesbians, however,earn more than heterosexual females. This earnings advantage is considerablysmaller when we study full-time monthly rather than annual earnings but an earningsadvantage for lesbians at the top of the earnings distribution is documentedregardless of which earnings measure we use. In addition, lesbians are doing betterthan female heterosexuals in the public sector. To sum up, the results indicate thatgay males face obstacles on the labor market that hinder them from reaching toplevelpositions and high earnings. The earnings advantage observed for lesbians islikely to stem from the fact that lesbians devote more time to market work thanheterosexual females.

Primary school in Sweden has an important task to counteract traditional gender patterns and promote equality. The purpose of this study is to investigate how three fiction books portray girls and women as well as boys and men. The three chosen books are Rodrick regerar Dagbok för alla mina fans (2009), Glasbarnen (2012) and Det är jag som är Mickan (2015). This thesis will review whether the books were compatible with the national curriculum for Swedish school for the grade 1-9. To support our investigation, we have used Hirdman’s gender theory as a framework. Hirdman’s gender theory concerns the intersection of the gender and the hierarchy where the male is displayed as the norm. The study was executed with a qualitative text analysis. The results show that only two of the three chosen books correspond to the current curriculum requirements of counteracting traditional gender patterns. The third book promotes rather than counteracts traditional gender patterns as it still assigns more traditional characteristics and actions to boys, men, girls and women depending on gender. These results are evidence of and suggest that it is important to review the material we use for educational purposes because there are books that describe boys and girls in an unfair behavior, therefore this requires discussing the norms that is conveyed in the students’ fiction books.

This thesis is a study of gender and honour, focusing on NGO’s who work to support women in Sweden who have escaped honour violence. The purpose of this thesis is to find out and explain how they make sense of honour and more specifically, to investigate how does Swedish authorities can help the Middle Eastern women who are victims under this tradition.

My focus through this thesis will be on the data analysis, moreover, using intersectionality as an analytical tool will help to explain the intersections which lead to the honour killings.

The results show that the honour violence still exists in the Swedish society as well as the Middle East, in addition, some Middle Eastern people who moved to Sweden still believe and practice the honour culture in the Swedish society. More than that, I got the answers for all the research questions which helped me to clarify the relation between honour and its intersections which helped me to know the reasons why does the Honour violence/killings can happen. The answers agree that the honour violence is connected to the shame and guilt cultures. The meaning of honour is different in different cultures. Most of the honour related cases have women as victims. The honour has many intersections, most of them related to virginity, homosexuality, out marriage relations and rape. The Swedish organisations offer help for the victims of honour.

More than that, reading my thesis will give the reader the understanding of the phenomena of Honour, its intersections and how it does exist in the Middle Eastern culture and its old traditions.